writing in the dust

“Evil rolls across the ages, but so does good. Good has its own momentum. Corruption never wholly succeeds. (Even blasphemers acknowledge God.) Creation is stronger than sin and grace stronger still. Creation and grace are anvils that have worn out a lot of our hammers. To speak of sin itself, to speak of it apart from the realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way. Moreover, to speak of sin by itself is to misunderstand its nature: sin is only a parasite, a vandal, a spoiler. Sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life. To concentrate on our rebellion, defection, and folly—to say to the world ‘I have some bad news and I have some bad news’—is to forget that the center of the Christian religion is not our sin but our Savior. To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.”

— Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., qtd. here

“

I have to tell you, it took me a while to get used to. Crumb, after all, is one of those innately funny people whose mere way of expressing things makes you laugh. Even when he shows the men of Sodom threatening Lot in Chapter 19, there’s something inherently comical in his drawing. Maybe he can’t help it. Maybe it’s me. But for the first 19 chapters, I experienced discord between image and prose.

But by the 20th, I was hooked. I’ve read Genesis before. But never have I found it so compelling. By placing it squarely in the Middle East — and populating it with distinctly Semitic-looking people — Crumb makes it come alive brilliantly. You feel the dust, the heat, the anguish, the toil involved in crossing the desert. You even smell the lamb roasting.

Crumb is at his best when he does people, not panoramas. The most intimate scenes are the most affecting. Reading Chapter 27, where Jacob steals Esau’s blessing from their father, I actually cried. And by the end, I said aloud, “Oh, don’t stop. What happens next?”

”

— Susan Jane Gilman on R. Crumb’s new illustrated version of Genesis

“… if we [Christians] are to be kingdom-announcers, modelling the new way of being human, we are also to be crossbearers. This is a strange and dark theme which is also our birthright as followers of Jesus. Shaping our world is never, for a Christian, a matter of going out arrogantly thinking we can just get on with the job, can reorganize the world according to some model that we have in mind. It is a matter of sharing and bearing the pain and puzzlement of the world, so that the crucified love of God in Christ may be brought to bear healingly upon the world at exactly that point. Because Jesus bore the cross uniquely for us, we do not have to purchase forgiveness again; it’s been done. But because, as he himself said, following him involves taking up the cross, we should expect, as the New Testament tells us repeatedly, that to build on his foundation will be to find the cross etched into the pattern of our life and work over and over again.”

— N. T. Wright. Ever since I first read this passage from The Challenge of Jesus several years ago, it has had a profound impact on my sense of what Christian spirituality is, and what prayer and evangelism ought to look like at present: “sharing and bearing the pain and puzzlement of the world…”

“If interpretation is more like getting a joke than it is like dissecting a frog, then only certain kinds of people will be good interpreters…. What, after all, can one do with someone who has no sense of humor? Analysis and teaching might improve things marginally, but that person’s main problem is not a technical but a spiritual one: somebody without a sense of humor suffers from a contracted soul, and the only real solution is conversion. Interpretive skills can be taught and improved, but only the glad of heart make good readers.”

— Leithart again (from Deep Exegesis)

“King Christ,this world is all aleak;
and lifepreservers there are none:
and waves which only He may walk
Who dares to call Himself a man.”

— e. e. cummings

“Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner—through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational riffing and Talmudic debate—the world of the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the best senses of the word: a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it—to explore the imaginary world—oneself. And if we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries, then at least let us stipulate that we shall be hopeless and inept like Max Fischer, the hero of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: in the most passionate, heedless, and whole-hearted way.”

— Michael Chabon (here, via Luke)

“… students of the Bible are usually inoculated against literary fancies early on in their training. The more expert they get, the more inoculated they become.”

— Peter Leithart (in Deep Exegesis)